Are Analysts Being Too Brave in the $1,000 Amazon and Alphabet Stock Race?

Friday’s movers in technology have been more than moderately impressive. The earnings report from Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) have sent these shares to new highs. With Alphabet, the one most of us still call Google, trading at $729 or so and with Amazon above $600, we cannot help but at least wonder if analysts are ratcheting their price targets up too much.

The reality is that these are great companies and they are continuing to change the world. Amazon’s market cap just grew by over $17 billion and Alphabet’s grew by $34 billion — for two earnings reports adding a combined $51 billion in market cap overnight. These stocks are definitely in their sweet spot right now at new highs, but what happens if the market volatility comes back into play?

Since 24/7 Wall St. has already covered the Alphabet earnings report and the Amazon earnings report in detail, we are going to skip how well those reports looked. It is still worth pointing out that the forward valuations for next year value Alphabet at about 22 times 2016 earnings and puts Amazon at about 125 times 2016 earnings.

Here is how much the price targets have gone up at brokerage firms, and these are far from the only analyst valuation bumps because there were so many.

Alphabet literally scored what was more than 20 analyst price target hikes and/or upgrades. Here are 11 such hike or upgrades: